(Open thread, links, stuff …)

The better half has been in NY for a few days, so I’ve been juggling some unusually intense kid-management with getting my (short) time-travel book up on Kindle, and all kinds of threads have been dropped. Kindle throws me into a greater state of ambivalence than anything else I know. It’s at once a delight — raw disintermediation euphoria — and an absolute nightmare due to the obstruction the interface puts in the way of editorial control. Would it really be impossible to allow an editorial function at the MOBI end? It seems obvious that Amazon has put almost the whole of its attention into the reader-experience end, but it’s getting content-providers fused with the process that will lock-in the future. The present set-up can only be considered a flaky intermediate stage.

While I’ve been distracted, NRx seems to have been in exceptionally productive mode. Among the best things I’ve picked up on have been an epic overview of far-right practicality by Yuray, Nydwracu on the slow collapse, Anomaly revisiting the Trichotomy, Poseidon Awoke on Left-Liberal difference, and Dampier prodding traditionalists, and tech-comms (but this might have been my favorite recent Dampier piece). Feminist outreach from Jim: “A woman is like a badly behaved dog …” Machine Lords. Cathedral Cultural Studies. He‘s baaaaack.

Gamergate remains a popcorn machine. Some outer-edge of lunacy exploration here (sample: “… if South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission can do it, I don’t think I’m asking so much. … America is Gamergate”). ClarkHat chats to AoS. Tactical stuff. Christian-shaming. Alexa-analytics on the great migration. The Grays. Hitler.

Ebola science. (This story is losing its grip on my mind — strange that something continuing up an exponential curve can do that.)

Clausewitz and nonlinearity (superbly done).

Games Theory simulation for Eth-Nats.

Free Northerner completes his To Be A Christian series (with internal links to the rest). And, from Matt Walsh: “We are, without a doubt, the most marriage-averse group in human history.”

A conversation with Nicholas Wade.

“I don’t care.”

ADDED: The Dampier Trichotomy-tour is completed (with a penetrating look at nationalism).

“If you care about democracy in the world, we are in trouble.”

Savor the exquisite taste of Jacobin tears.

(“We should bet heavily on this battle of information and ideas. It is a battle we can win. … we need to promote the spirit of democracy.” Larry Diamond is quite clearly one of the most dangerous lunatics alive in the world today.)

The sense of an ending:

As George Steiner once put it in conversation, “The humanities have had 23 good centuries — don’t get greedy or upset that it happens to be coming to an end.” Let’s no longer say, “How can we save the humanities?” Instead, let us admit, “Liberal education is over. What do we do now?”

Succinct perfection from Fernandez:

The only socialist form of self-correction is apparently collapse.

ADDED: Glenn Reynolds being silly — “[Mancur] Olson wrote that — as with the German and Japanese booms after World War II — it takes a major calamity, such as a war or a revolution, to cut through that web and allow economic growth to take off again. I’ve argued in the past that massive democratic change — a ‘wave’ election — might accomplish the same end.”

ADDED: Collapse candidate No.1

An engagement with this (extraordinarily interesting) monetary analysis isn’t going to reach any kind of remotely convincing state tonight. Perhaps I can buy people off for a while with a few of these:

It actually says pretty much everything that needs to be said, in compressed form.

There’s an additional Weiner post of special relevance here. (His definition of inflation as ‘counterfeit credit’ does a lot of theoretical work, very quickly.)

(Open thread, and links.)

Ebola! Stories from Nigeria (good) and Europe (not so good). Contagion math (and from Taleb). “The End of the World: it’s sooner than you think.” Ebola as a morbid cultural indicator. Oddness and lunacy.

Fertility transitions and dysgenics. (Related.)

Some (old) background to Singularity and time preference. There’s a lot more to discuss about technology, reaction, and time horizons at some point (given time).

Secrets.

Taking trolls seriously.

Dampier on van Creveld on sexual privilege. Mangan on masculinity and politics. Goddesses and man at Harvard. Phalanx: “… we envision a group of men meeting regularly to do things like the following: Go to church …”

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Asabiyyah is an Arabic word for a reason. Unlike many of my allies on the extreme right, I see no point at all in other cultures attempting to emulate it. The idea of a contemporary Western asabiyyah is roughly as probable as the emergence of Arabic libertarian capitalism. In any case, ISIS has it now, which means they have to keep fighting, and will probably keep winning. Asabiyyah is useless for anything but war, and it dissolves into dust with peace. The only glories Islam will ever know going forward will be found on the battlefield, and it is fully aware of the fact.

Baghdad will almost certainly have fallen by the end of the year, or early next. The Caliphate will then be reborn, in an incarnation far more ferocious than the last. Its existence will coincide with a war, extending far beyond Mesopotamia and the Levant, at least through the Middle East, into the Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent, across the Maghreb, and deep into Africa. If the Turks are not terrified about what is coming, they have no understanding of the situation. This is what the global momentum behind militant ‘Islamism’ across recent decades has been about. Realistically, it’s unstoppable.

Eventually, it will bleed out, and then Islam will have done the last thing of which it is capable. No less than tens of millions will be dead.

Other, industrially-competent and technologically-sophisticated civilizations have no cause for existential panic, although mega-terrorist attacks could hurt them. Any efforts they make to pacify the Caliphate-war will be futile, at best. It is a piece of fate now. The future will have to be built around it.

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Michael Totten covers an impressive amount of ground in his overview of contemporary zombie culture. It might be called the Dark Anthropocene: An emerging world spooked by the thickening dread that everybody else on the planet is a latent zombie threat. Beneath a thin, rapidly-shredding skin of civility, your increasingly incomprehensible neighbors are mindless cannibals, awaiting a trigger. Dysfunctional Nation States offer no credible protection, but they’ve hung around long enough to ensure that you’ve been drastically disarmed of basic survival competences. Some residual amygdala-pulse is telling you to start thinking-through how you’ll cope when it all finally caves in.

No surprise to anyone that Outside in sees this, quite straightforwardly, as democratic introspection. It only takes people to start feasting directly in the same way they vote, and we’re Zacked. The entire culture is saying — and by now practically screaming — that this is the way socio-political modernity ends.

Blame Bloom for luring me into this blasted landscape. (I agree with JAB that there’s something important going on here.)

A Doom Paul video selection (1, 2, 3).

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A humorous access-gate into a serious insight at AoS:

This is not a government; this a corporate PR firm. The PR firm has a smaller child corporation that is tangentially in the business of government, and its chief stock in trade is failure.
The PR firm runs the show, and the corporate PR firm is here to tell you two things:
1, everything’s fine, nothing to see here, errors were made but by the way errors weren’t even made,
and,
2, if you don’t agree, there’s something wrong with you. Perhaps racism.

A social machine designed for accelerating system-collapse would be built pretty much exactly like this. (Read the whole post for explanatory context.)